As a matter of practical politics the State purchase scheme of the Nationalization Society is of chief moment. Although the Georgites and the Socialists are active and vociferous, their respective schemes are of much less relative importance. Even assuming that the land was originally acquired by private persons by robbery or injustice, the best equitable answer to the “taxing-out scheme” is probably that of the Nationalization Society:
We answer that while the land is ours by every moral right, and we propose to assume possession of it by compulsory process, we recognize that a very large number of honest men (neither robber barons nor their descendants) have invested actual earned money in land, either as individuals or as members of building, insurance and co-operative societies and trade unions.
“Therefore, we do not propose to confiscate that money (i.e. that portion of the rent which represents the value of the bare land) and leave to them what is theirs (i.e. that portion of the rent which represents the value of the improvements)” (The Land Nationalizer, May, 1919, p. 5).
The Secretary of the Land Nationalization Society writes thus:
“We who favour compensation justify it on grounds which appear to us to be grounds of equity. We say that the landlords of the present day did not found the system of private property in land, and should not be punished (by spoliation) as if they did. The original wrongdoers are dead and past punishments. Neither are the present landlords alone responsible for the maintenance of the system. That system is supported by the well-to-do classes generally, who look upon land as legitimate private property, and even by the great mass of unthinking landless people who send a majority of landlords and friends of landlords to Parliament at every chance they get. If landowning is a crime, then the majority of the British people are aiders and abettors of it.... We must be prepared to give a fair value for the land whether it be held by a duke or a working man.” (State Land Purchase, by Joseph Hyder, p. 3.)
The practical answer to the “George” or “taxing-out scheme” is that it is not possible to separate the value of the land from the value of the improvements on it. Anything which mankind has added to the natural land is capital and should, according to the George view, be inviolate. In proposing, as “the George scheme” does, only to allow for “the value of the clearly distinguishable improvements made within a moderate time,” capital is being confiscated. That is, something is being confiscated which was not stolen. If one form of capital may be confiscated, why not all forms?
The Land Nationalization Society has formulated many objections to the “George” or “taxing-out scheme” apart from its injustice. They say it would be an interminable process, that it would not be effective—witness the failure of the heavy land taxation in Canada, New Zealand or Australia, to cheapen land or eliminate landlords—that the public would not accept it. So many persons are owners of small pieces of land, it would tend to increase the number of landlords instead of reducing them.
The way in which the advocates of State purchase try to make out their case is very simple, and they do it with great ingenuity. They first endeavour to prove their basic axiom of “the right to live” by appeal to the great English common lawyers, writers on Sociology and authorities on Political Economy. Having done that to their own satisfaction, they proceed to give at length illustrations of alleged despotic and churlish action on the part of landowners. The favourites are the Highland Clearances and landlordism in Ireland. Then in the same vein they bring forward a great collection of cases of alleged refusal of land by landowners for works of public importance, or exaction by landowners of what is said to be (without any evidence) a wholly unreasonable price for land for public purposes (see, for instance, Chapter V, “The Extortion of High Prices for Land” in The Case for Land Nationalization, by Joseph Hyder, Simpkin, Marshall & Co.). All these evils are said to be directly due to private ownership in land. These cases, if they ever existed, are amply remedied by recent Acts facilitating the acquisition of land.[7] Having got so far, every hardship or evil to which a farmer or agricultural labourer is subject is likewise under the same chain of reasoning ascribed (without proof) to private ownership in land. If, therefore, the basic axiom is to be vindicated, private ownership must be done away with. There is no logic in such reasoning, even assuming that the basic axiom in its widest extension is sound—as a matter of fact it is not. All these illustrations show is that the present land system may, in certain respects, require reform, not that it ought to be abolished. The argument makes out no case for the complete eradication of the whole landlord system, still less for State purchase. The fallacy lies in the wholly unproved assumption that State ownership is the only alternative to an unreformed land system.
The Disadvantages of State Ownership of Land
It is difficult to state succinctly the many objections[8] to State ownership of land: